Belfast Catholics riot after token Orange march

Orange Order members march past the mainly Catholic Ardyone area of North Belfast, Northen Ireland, Thursday, July 12, 2012. The Twelfth of July is the busiest day of the marching season in Northern Ireland with thousands of Orangemen and women, accompanied by marching bands, taking part in hundreds of parades. The Orange Order holds its main Belfast event, which commemorates King William III's 1690 Battle of the Boyne victory over Catholic King James II.

Peter Morrison, Associated Press

Summary

Irish Catholic militants attacked riot police Thursday in a divided corner of Belfast as the most polarizing day on Northern Ireland's calendar reached a typically ugly end — and yet managed, amid the smoke and chaos, to take a few tentative steps toward compromise.

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — Irish Catholic militants attacked riot police Thursday in a divided corner of Belfast as the most polarizing day on Northern Ireland's calendar reached a typically ugly end — and yet managed, amid the smoke and chaos, to take a few tentative steps toward compromise.

Many hours of violence in the hardline Catholic Ardoyne district marked the fourth straight year that the area has descended into anarchy following the annual passage of Protestant marchers from the Orange Order brotherhood.

Massive Orange parades across Northern Ireland each July 12 — an official holiday that commemorates the Protestant side's victory in 17th-century religious warfare — often stoke conflict with Catholics, who despise the annual marches as a Protestant show of superiority.

But in recent years, as British authorities have restricted the Protestants' march routes, a drab stretch of road that passes a row of Ardoyne shops has become the focal point for province-wide animosity. There, the decades-old battle for supremacy between the British Protestant majority and Irish Catholic minority wages a yearly test of wills, with heavily armored police stuck in the middle.

A British government-appointed Parades Commission sought to defuse the Ardoyne conflict this year by ordering the Orangemen to march along Crumlin Road by 4 p.m. local time, three hours sooner than normal. Protestant leaders grudgingly accepted the deadline rather than mount a later standoff, and all sides agreed this gesture kept a bad situation from turning even worse.

The Parades Commission and police also permitted Ardoyne residents for the first time to stage their own march on the road a few hours later in a bid to balance competing rights. Protracted violence by masked Ardoyne youths followed that second gesture.

As the rioting headed toward midnight, police said nine officers had been wounded and two rioters arrested. They said rioters had hijacked and burned three cars and were tossing occasional Molotov cocktails at police lines. Officers responded by firing a half-dozen plastic bullets, blunt-nosed cylinders designed to knock down the target without penetrating the skin.

The sectarian showdown on Crumlin Road demonstrated how, despite a two-decade peace process and five years of a joint Catholic-Protestant government, Northern Ireland at grass-roots level still faces a long, uncertain journey to achieve reconciliation.

Indeed, Protestant officials of the unity government took part in the Orange parade, while some of their Catholic counterparts stood with the Ardoyne protesters. And yet both sides' leaders said the dispute would do nothing to derail their continued cooperation the rest of the year.

Orangemen, unable to reach Ardoyne on foot by the Parades Commission's 4 p.m. deadline, considered standing their ground with police in a bid to force their march through in the evening. Their leaders insisted they had to defend their right to freedom of assembly, fearing that once banned from a particular stretch of road they would never be permitted to return.

But aware that a standoff would inevitably end in violent clashes between Protestants and police, Orange leaders decided to observe the deadline and compromise — while still maintaining a symbolic claim to the road.

They sent a token group of two dozen members by bus to march along that short stretch of road past the Ardoyne shops. Police girded in flame-retardant boiler suits, helmets, shatter-proof visors and shields flanked the tiny Orange procession as several hundred Protestants, many waving Union Jacks, cheered the scene from one side of the thoroughfare.

On the other side, masked Catholic youths were already stockpiling makeshift weapons for the night's fight ahead. Denied a decent Orange provocation, the Irish side appeared hell-bent on confronting the police regardless.